Protecting the quiet
I’m scaring myself a little bit. I set out to become a novelist, and now I feel like a product manager. A few months ago, . . .
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. . . The Washashore existed in four forms. In a few weeks, when The Holdfast audiobook drops, there will be two books in five forms apiece. Ten SKUs.
There’s something inherently alarming about becoming a novelist and discovering that you now think in terms like “SKUs.”
That little flock of SKUs produces a staggering amount of work. Production decisions. Audiobook proofing. Marketing. Social posts. Newsletters. Events. Book orders. Mailing books to contests and programs. Reader correspondence. Bookstores. Travel. Three upcoming conferences. And whatever else appears in your inbox while you are doing those things.
Don’t get me wrong, those are all good things. I love talking to readers, and it is fun to learn a new craft, a new industry, and a new set of supporting skills and tools. People are reading the books. I am getting opportunities. The books are taking on lives of their own and finding their readers.
But there is a cost. I need to keep working on book three. And it’s getting harder every day, not easier. The anxiety about it is building.
My first instinct was to look at the problem as a time-management question. How could I protect writing time? I am not blocked. I am not bored. I am not searching for an idea. I am just too buried to write.
So I think to myself, maybe I should protect the mornings, when I am fresh. Or maybe I alternate days: day one is admin, day two is creative, and so on.
But as I have been sitting with these ideas and trying to come up with a solution, a realization has crept up on me. It’s not just time. It’s mental fragmentation. Even if I blast through an entire day’s admin before noon and leave myself with a solid chunk of afternoon to write, I can’t do it.
It’s not just that I am fried. It’s that I am fragmented. The tasks may be finished, but they haven’t entirely left my head. It’s noisy in there with the echoes of fifteen things occupying little pieces of my attention. An email I’m waiting for. Something I will need to approve. A package that has to go out. An event detail waiting on someone else. A social post. An audiobook question. A flight. Something somebody needs from me tomorrow.
Fiction requires me to go somewhere else for a while. I have to hold a scene in my head, inhabit the characters, hear how they talk, notice what they’re noticing. That requires sustained attention of a completely different kind from answering twenty emails and making fifteen small decisions.
And after enough administrative work, I can’t simply flip the switch. By the time I am through, there are so many people talking in my head that Silas can’t get a word in edgewise—which, admittedly, was never his strong suit to begin with.
It’s got me worried. I am in a trap of my own making: my writing has started generating enough work to interfere with my writing.
I haven’t found the answer yet. I am figuring it out now, as I write this post instead of the next chapter. Maybe it is protected mornings, or alternating days. I don’t know.
But I have figured out enough to know that the objective has changed. I am not trying to protect writing time. I am trying to protect the state of mind that makes writing possible.
I’m trying to protect the quiet.
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